Stephan Spencer is a 3-time author, avid blogger, international speaker, and consultant on all things SEO. He founded his own SEO agency, Netconcepts, and even created a unique pay-for-performance SEO technology. He’s also the host of two weekly podcasts, Marketing Speak and Optimized Geek.

In this episode of Marketing the Invisible, Shares shares the misconceptions about SEO that could cause you to lose everything.

Check out these episode highlights:

00:29 – Stephan’s professional background as an SEO Expert

01:48 – His ideal clients: mid to large sized businesses who wants to improve their rankings in Google

02:32 – common mistakes that his ideal clients are likely to make when trying to fix their ranking problems

02:37 – The symptoms his clients experience when trying to solve their SEO problems

07:57 – How do you avoid getting snookered if you don’t know SEO that well and you’ve got to hire an SEO expert. You can hire me but you probably you’re going to hire somebody else. And for that go to my valuable free resource and you’ll get the SEO hiring blueprint and the SEO BS detector which has trick questions and it’s so that you can slip those into the interview and you have the answers there. And you’ll find out who the posers are.

Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland:Hello everyone. A very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland I’m joined today by Stephan Spencer. Stephan, where are you hanging out man?

Stephan Spencer: Santa Monica, California.

Tom Poland:Santa Monica. They’ve got a boulevard there, right?

Stephan Spencer: Hell yeah.

Tom Poland:I’ve seen a song somewhere.

Stephan Spencer: And a promenade and pier it’s a beautiful place to live.

Tom Poland:Fantastic. Well, I’m just delighted you joined us. For those of you who don’t know Stephan, he’s a bit of a legend really. He’s generated millions and millions and millions of dollars of revenue and it’s not in his bio. But I wanted to tell you that because I want you to understand that it’s a bit of a privilege to hear from him. So well, I mean it’s it’s well deserved. So the bio which is understated, very modest three times author, avid blogger, international speaker, and consultant on all things S E O . He founded his own SEO agency NetConcepts in terms of marketing. I’m just a lot of this because he created a very unique world first pay per performance SEO technology which meant that you paid for results. As opposed to handing over a fat fee every month to an agency and hope to hell I get it right. So from a marketing point of view, that’s just brilliant because it just removes the obstacle for people buying. But I’ll get off my little marketing hobbyhorse now and get back to Stephan I promise. He’s also the host of the two weekly podcast Marketing Speak and Optimized Geek. Very clever. So the title is Quick Steps to Improve Your SEO.

Tom Poland:We’re going to do that in just seven minutes Stephan our time starts now. Question number one is who’s your ideal client?

Stephan Spencer: Anybody who wants to improve their rankings in Google will benefit. But my ideal client is mid to large sized businesses. Brands like Zappos and Volvo and Chanel, for example, are my ideal but any business that is innovative and nimble. I love working with.

Tom Poland:So what’s the problem you solve?

Stephan Spencer: A lot of clients don’t understand what the secret sauce is to get high rankings in Google. They just look at Google as a black box and if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking Yeah I see it the same way it’s just black magic voodoo as far as I’m concerned. It’s good you’re listening to this episode.

Stephan Spencer: :Right. So when someone regards Google as the big black box and they have no idea how to get found at all. What are some of the typical symptoms of frustration or disappointments they’re going to be experiencing?

Stephan Spencer: Well for one they don’t know when they’re winning and when they’re losing. They just hand check their rankings in Google what they don’t realize is that those results are tailored and personalized to you. So you’re getting different results then your prospect who doesn’t see you on page one but you’re instead on page two for them. Your results are customized based on your search history and so forth. Your location etcetera. So you got that problem and you’re just not even aware. You haven’t set up the proper baselines to measure against. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know where you’re at. You’re flying blind. You don’t realize there are tools out there that will help you to compare yourself with competitors in terms of a number of organic keywords that you’re ranking for and estimated traffic volumes coming from Google for you versus competitors in your space etcetera. It’s like trying to diagnose a disease without even being able to articulate the symptoms. It’s very hard. So you get a lot more traffic you just don’t know how.

Tom Poland:And so if people are wanting more traffic before they come to you and get a professional solution what are some of the common mistakes that are likely to make?

Stephan Spencer: There’s so many. So many because they had a design firm or web developer build them a site and they said they knew SEO or they just there was never even brought up. And it’s like building a house without having the electrical wiring put in. And nobody knows to bring this out and say hey the light switches don’t work. Well, that’s because you didn’t tell us to wire the house with electrical. Then you have to tear the drywall and wire the house, patch the drywall. Very expensive. You want this stuff baked in from the ground up. SEO needs to be baked into the site from the ground up. So let’s say that you’ve gone with a platform that is in search engine friendly. Let’s say it is search engine friendly. Let’s say you’re running on WordPress very search engine friendly but it’s not searching engine optimized because you would have had to think about all those things like the electrical and the plumbing and everything ahead of time and get that all squared away as the site was being built. You have to go back retroactively fix all this stuff. Big pain in the butt. What sort of things do they have to go and retroactively fixed? Well let’s say that you have a site that includes a blog and you’ve got date-based archives, you’d have author pages, you have tag pages. These are all pages that are probably not going to be good for your SEO. They’re going to be considered thin content by Google. They’re going to be considered duplicate content because you’re reusing all the same content from the blog posts on these tag pages on these date based archives pages. It’s a mess and you have to go in and you get to fix all this. And might be using the words that are industry vernacular but not the words that your customer base uses.

Stephan Spencer: Like for example I was working with Kohl’s department stores and so they were a client who insisted on ranking for kitchen electrics and I’m like nobody’s searching for that. Nobody even knows what that is. Do you know what a kitchen electric is?

Tom Poland:I guess is an appliance.

Stephan Spencer: It’s a small kitchen appliance for the countertop. Like a food processor, blender or toaster.

Tom Poland:Right. So in the industry, they would refer to that talking to each other an electric kitchen electrics but no one goes and I wonder what kind of kitchen electrics today. OK.

Stephan Spencer: Now getting those words wrong means that you’re going to rank for the words that nobody searches for but maybe your CEO does.

Tom Poland:Yeah. OK so not very helpful.

Tom Poland:All right. So Question number five what’s one valuable free action that an audience member can implement that’s going to take them not gonna solve the whole problem but it goes take them a step in the right direction.

Stephan Spencer: We’ll figure out what words people are searching for. And there some great free tools that do this. Google Trends for example. Did you know in fact with Google trends so if you go to Google.com/trends you can put in multiple keywords and compare them with each other like putting kitchen electrics, Kitchen Appliances and see the difference in search volumes over time with those two keywords? That’s pretty cool. That you can also do the same thing inside of Google Trends and choose the option underneath where it says web search choose youtube search. And now you can see what the number two search engine which is YouTube it’s not Bing, it’s not Yahoo. See what the search behaviors are for YouTube searchers.

Tom Poland:Is very valuable very valuable.

Stephan Spencer: Google Trends, answerthepublic.com is another free tool that’s awesome. If you get questions back that people are typing into Google. So if you put in let’s say kitchen appliances then you’ll get questions like ‘How do I repair my kitchen appliances, where do I go to school to learn how to repair kitchen appliances, Where do I get the best deals on kitchen appliance etcetera.’

Tom Poland:Terrific. Thank you. Thirty seconds left. Two questions to go to the next one for the second time the valuable free resource you can find a wwww.marketingspeakdot.com/invisible. Last question 20 seconds left. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t.

Stephan Spencer: OK. So how do you avoid getting snookered if you don’t know SEO that well and you’ve got to hire an SEO expert? You can hire me but you probably you’re going to hire somebody else. And for that go to my valuable free resource and you’ll get the SEO hiring blueprint and the SEO B.S. detector which has trick questions and it’s so that you can slip those into the interview and you have the answers there. And you’ll find out who the posers are.

Tom Poland:Thanks for checking out our Marketing of the Invisible podcast if you like what we’re doing here. Please get over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.FiveHourChallenge.com.

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MEET YOUR HOST

Tom Poland is the creator of The Five Hour Lead Generation Challenge found at www.FiveHourChallenge.com and the proprietary Leadsology® Model.

He works with professionals to embed lead generation systems into their businesses so they enjoy a weekly flow of new client inquiries.

Tom started his first advisory business at age 24 and has gone on to start and sell four others, taking two of them international. In that time, he’s managed teams of over 100 people and annual revenue of more than $20 million.

He is a multiple best-selling author and also shared international speaking platforms with the likes of Michael Gerber of E-Myth fame, Richard Koch from The 80–20 Principle, Marshall Goldsmith and many others.

Tom is voluntarily married and lives on the sand at Castaways Beach on the fabulous Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia.